Monday 6 July 2009

My daughter wins "Miss Cool-Calm-and-Collected 2009"


So this morning I got my weekly email from my daughter , -the lovely , witty and talented Claire-, entitled "could have been worse"...

She lives in Edenvale with my son,the funny and equally talented 'gonzo' Rowan;her mum,Diana;and her step-father Shal. He is a flight-paramedic and on Saturday was en route from Angola to Brazil with a patient.He had a brief layover in Johannesburg between flights, but needed to stay at the Airport Hotel with the patient...they live only a few kilometers from Joburg International...

Anyway Shal was staying at the holiday inn at the airport because he was in transit to Brazil and he asked mom and I to go there for dinner.
So against our better judgment we got in the car just after 8 in the cold and started to go there. We haven't been on the highway for 5 min when we have an attempted hijacking.
As we were driving we see this thing come flying down from the left and smash into our car.
We didn't stop. We thought it was a ball or something.
When we got the hotel we saw that the grille has been totally ruined and that there was still half a brick wedged in the engine.
The reason we know it was an attempted hijacking is because they throw bricks at the windscreen so that you stop.
Luckily we were going quite slowly and we didn't stop. Anyway Shal freaked out. Mom and I were fine.
On the way home we went to report to the cops and boy o boy can you see why we are crime ridden. The constable that helped us couldn't spell at all and could barely understand what we were saying.
It took us almost an hour to do a simple statement.
But the funniest thing that happened was that while he was helping us, he was very polite and everything but all of a sudden he just says "The grille is fucked up you must throw it away".
It was the way he said it, so nonchalant that got us. Mom had that look on her face like 'did he really say that'? It was priceless.
But we are OK. Everyone was like 'weren't you guys in shock?' But we are far too practical to get shaken by something like that. If it was worse then maybe but we were very lucky.


I just platzed...had a real galish...and phoned her straight away...to find she was calmly at work sorting out her new business venture...

1 comment:

  1. When my brother (in SA) was held up at gunpoint right outside his front door at 11.25pm, he calmly put up his hands, stepped away from his car and said "Take it, my wallet and phone are in the car too." and then just watched his car being driven away. He then woke up the neighbours, got his spare key to open his house, phoned the insurance company and activated the tracker. An hour later, he sat outside a shanty in the middle of Alexandra in the armed response unit vehicle looking at his car. He (not so) calmly got out of the AR vehicle and, using his spare keys, opened his car, started it and drove back home.

    He said the scariest bit was not having a loaded gun shoved in his face, but sitting in the AR vehicle outside the shanty knowing he had to climb out and retrieve his car. At any point, the thieves who'd nicked it could have come out of the shanty and shot him.

    Personally, I crapped myself the minute I heard he and his wife'd been held up!

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